Light Art Comes to Life: Dancing Animated Gifs by Lucea Spinelli

Beams of light dance, jump, squiggle, scatter and interact with each other as if they’ve taken on a life of their own in a series of animated light art gifs by New York City-based photographer Lucea Spinelli. Abandoned school buses, public park benches, playgrounds, glass jars and human bodies become the settings for surreal, almost ghostly scenes calling to mind the common superstition of supernatural beings affecting electricity.

In fact, all that seems to be missing from some of these animations is a proton pack from Ghostbusters, as the clusters of light created by Spinelli take on the movements of autonomous beings. Spinelli takes still shots of moving light using long exposure methods and then strings them together to create these animated sequences.

“In her project phötosgraphé, Lucea Spinelli creates long exposure photographs that afford us a view into the unknown,” reads the statement on the artist’s website. “For the duration of the open shutter the lens becomes a canvas upon which Lucea paints with light. The illuminated forms she creates interact with spaces and objects in a wa that evoke the unseen – such as spirit, dreams and metaphor – within the everyday.”

“Often staying in the dark for long hours and relying on muscle memory alone, the process reflects ritual as a necessary part of interacting and evoking the unseen aspects of our reality. Thus by using a medium is commonly used to mimic reality, to suspend it, Lucea invites us to push beyond the bounds of visual perception to explore other ways of knowing. Finally, by stringing sequences of these long exposure photographs together into an animated gif, the light forms are literally brought to life as they dance across the forever looping frame.”